Is the Writer’s Only Responsibility to His Art?

Jan. 19, 2016

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. Faulkner said, “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.” This week, Zoë Heller and Francine Prose discuss the obligations of artists.

By Zoë Heller

The belief that artists are entitled to be morally careless has proved to be one of the more tenacious parts of our Romantic inheritance.

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Zoë HellerCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Faulkner seemed to rather relish being horrid in the name of art. “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate,” he told The Paris Review in 1956. “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” There’s something a little posturing about the epigrammatic cruelty of this remark, but the evidence suggests that Faulkner practiced the mercilessness he preached. When his 12-year-old daughter once asked him to postpone one of his alcoholic binges until after her birthday celebrations, he famously refused, telling her, “No one remembers Shakespeare’s children.”

We may flinch at this sort of thing, but we remain, for the most part, curiously reluctant to reject Faulkner’s credo of artistic ruthlessness altogether. The belief that artists are entitled to be morally careless — that great art excuses everything — has proved to be one of the more tenacious parts of our Romantic inheritance. In Hollywood movies about artists, the characters who challenge the hero’s license to be inconsiderate — the landlady who hassles van Gogh about the appalling state of his garret, the neighbor who yells at Beethoven to keep the noise down, the sulky wife who insists that Johnny Cash stop canoodling with June Carter — are invariably presented as dreary philistines who must be ignored or defeated if truth and beauty are to triumph. (Yes, it’s sad for Mrs. Cash that Johnny prefers June, but what is the fleeting unhappiness of a suburban housewife compared with the timeless splendor of “Jackson”?)

Perhaps one way of disturbing our reflexive deference to the bad manners of great men is to read the firsthand testimonies of the women who have suffered them. Listening to the robbed mothers and oppressed spouses and neglected children of literary history, we notice that much of what has traditionally been ascribed to artistic ruthlessness is indistinguishable from the standard-issue selfishness of non-artists.

“And his biographers will tell of how he helped the laborers to carry buckets of water,” Countess Tolstoy wrote in her journal, “but no one will ever know that he never gave his wife a rest and never — in all these 32 years — gave his child a drink of water or spent five minutes by his bedside to give me a chance to rest a little, to sleep, or to go out for a walk, or even just recover from all my labors.”

Was it Tolstoy’s artistic vocation that stopped him from bringing one of his 13 children the odd glass of water, or just boorishness of the same dreary, unglamorous kind that is wont to afflict firemen and accountants? Speaking of children, why is it that Tolstoy, and so many other devoted artists, insisted on marrying and reproducing? It’s one thing to renounce the great world and hole up in a hermit’s shack in the service of your art. But it seems a very selective sort of ruthlessness to allow yourself all the conventional comforts of a bourgeois household and then insist on being unaccountable when it comes to the chores.

Sometimes, of course, the claims of art are genuinely at odds with the claims of human kindness, and an artist really does have to choose between, as it were, his sonnet and his mother. But it’s by no means clear that the “true” artist will always opt for the sonnet. Robert Lowell faced a version of this dilemma when deciding whether to publish “The Dolphin,” a set of poems that contained altered excerpts from the letters of his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. His friend Elizabeth Bishop wrote to him, urging against publication, but he went ahead anyway: “I couldn’t bear to have my book (my life) wait inside me like a dead child,” he later explained. The poems endure. But then so too does Bishop’s beautiful, agitated letter, in which she considers the cruelty of the poems — the immense distress they are bound to cause — and concludes, simply, “Art just isn’t worth that much.”

Zoë Heller is the author of three novels: “Everything You Know”; “Notes on a Scandal,” which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film; and “The Believers.” She has written feature articles and criticism for a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.

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By Francine Prose

The landscape of literary history is littered with the wreckage of writers who thought they were on a mission.

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Francine ProseCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

On the one hand we have William Faulkner telling us that a writer’s only responsibility is to his art, and on the other, Percy Bysshe Shelley suggesting that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I remember reading Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” in college and thinking, Seriously? Why couldn’t poets just write poems and leave legislation to the (acknowledged) legislators? Why should writers be so special, or, depending on how you look at it, so unfairly burdened?

I know plenty of poets who, I think, would be much better legislators than most of our elected officials. But I’d rather read their poems than watch them struggle to get a bill passed in Congress. I’m glad that when they go to their desks, they don’t think: Time to legislate! If they did, very few poems — or more likely, a lot of terrible poems — would be written.

Perhaps the problem for the author caught between two ways of expending energy — Do I write a beautiful poem or legislate? — is that people pay so much attention to writers: not as much attention as they pay to film and rock stars, but attention nonetheless. People imagine that writers do more than make up stories and put words on a page. They think that writers know something. And if you have a (let’s say) healthy ego, not uncommon among writers, the fact that your opinion is being asked may lead you to feel that you have a responsibility to be an unacknowledged (or acknowledged) legislator of the world.

The real difficulty arises when writers attempt to do both things at the same time: write the Great American Novel that will eradicate injustice forever. The landscape of literary history is littered with the wreckage of writers who thought they were on a mission. Gogol (with his failed attempt to write the Russia-saving sequel to “Dead Souls”) is among the many cautionary examples.

So what’s a writer to do? We want to write the loveliest, truest, most original and affecting sentence, the most musical poetic line. But meanwhile we may notice that the world is going to hell in a hand basket; and there we are, in our comfy ergonomic desk chairs, pursuing an activity that, we fear, is less socially useful than cultivating hydrangeas. Complicating matters is the fact that writers tend to be observant, which makes it harder not to notice the horrors transpiring in distant countries, and in our own.

Perhaps one solution is to separate our responsibility as artists (to art) from our human responsibility (to other human beings). Let’s look again at Shelley, who acted on both sets of imperatives without compromising either. His brief life featured an astonishing output of poems, plays, essays and tracts. He was politically radical, with fervent convictions about social justice, atheism, vegetarianism and nonviolence. Shelley is largely remembered not for his radicalism but for his poetry, and yet his political writing has influenced theorists and leaders including Marx and Gandhi.

If someone’s asking you to comment on the state of the world, it’s hard not to say what you believe. But that isn’t the writer’s job, which is, to paraphrase Faulkner, to write. Many writers — myself included — attempt to solve this quandary by telling themselves that writing truthfully and well, or trying to write truthfully and well, is itself a political act; that, to quote another of history’s most eloquent radicals, “the truth will set you free.”

The best description of what I myself think about an artist’s obligation comes neither from Faulkner nor from Shelley, but from Beckett: “Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.”

If I could do needlework, I’d embroider it on a sampler and hang it over my desk to remind me of my responsibilities.

Francine Prose is the author of 20 works of fiction and nonfiction, among them the novel “Blue Angel,” a National Book Award nominee, and the guide “Reading Like a Writer,” a New York Times best seller. Her new novel is “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.” Currently a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College, she is the recipient of numerous grants and awards; a contributing editor at Harper’s, Saveur and Bomb; a former president of the PEN American Center; and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 27 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Is the Writer’s Only Responsibility to His Art?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe